A Xen system is structured with the Xen hypervisor as the lowest and most privileged layer. Above this layer are one or more guest operating systems, which the hypervisor schedules across the physical CPUs. The first guest operating system, called in Xen terminology “domain 0″ (dom0), is booted automatically when the hypervisor boots and given special management privileges and direct access to the physical hardware. The system administrator can log into dom0 in order to manage any further guest operating systems, called “domain U” (domU) in Xen terminology.
On most CPUs, Xen uses a form of virtualization known as paravirtualization, meaning that the guest operating system must be modified to use a special hypercall ABI instead of certain architectural features. Through paravirtualization, Xen can achieve high performance even on its host architecture (x86) which is notoriously uncooperative with traditional virtualization techniques.
Both Intel and AMD have contributed modifications to Xen to support their AMD-V and Intel VT architecture extensions. This has been a significant development because it allows proprietary operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows) to be virtualized since the guest system’s kernel does not require modification when the host runs on Intel VT or AMD-V hardware.
Xen virtual machines can be “live migrated” between physical hosts across a LAN without loss of availability. During this procedure, the memory of the virtual machine is iteratively copied to the destination without stopping its execution. Stoppage of around 60–300 ms is required to perform final synchronization before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration.
